Nenets film draws crowds in Russian tundra village

European appetite for energy threatens ancient lifestyle

Yevgeni Hudi

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By Kirsikka Moring
     
      I wake to the feeling of reindeer fur tickling my nose. I am stiff with cold, but where am I?
      In the dark I start to In the dim light I start to recognise the place as a former classroom, familiar and blue. There is now an empty space where a small chalkboard used to be. On the floor, in addition to my furry bed, lies junk, dust, and broken desks.
     
Outside, above masses of ice and snow a pale moon is shining. When I open the door, a ghostly silent dark figure is moving, clad in reindeer fur. I almost let out a scream.
      A thief? Certainly not. He is sweeping away the snow that has accumulated on the steps during the night. Only a red carpet is missing.
      The best-known Nenets of the Yamal Peninsula have arrived in the village: Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio, who has been accepted into the clan.
     
I understand how impossible it is for Europeans to understand the historic importance of the documentaries and feature films that they have produced in Yamal.
      This is the school, one of the locations where the film Pudana: Last of The Line was shot, in the small vishing village of Sunai-Sale in the middle of the tundra.
      The film has come back home. Today it will be shown to the people of the village, who were involved in creating images in the cold of the winter and amongst swarms of summer mosquitoes.
     
The school is already a former school. On the other side of the piles of snow stands a new brick building, which was completed a couple of years ago. The abandoned premises is where the humiliations endured by Alexandra Okotetto, a Nenets girl in a Soviet boarding school of the 1960s, were depicted.
      The child was not allowed to speak her mother tongue. She did not understand why she needed to eat porridge, and she was not able to learn the alphabet of the foreign culture.
     
It is quiet outside. No cars or reindeer are to be seen. Snowmobiles buzz around the alleys between the few dozen houses, carrying firewood which has been brought to the treeless tundra from far away.
      There are all the more dogs. Loud, aggressive, and furry, after the severe winter. Walking past them is like walking past an honour guard, but it is not a good idea to make eye contact.
      The freezing temperatures keep people inside. Only schoolchildren carrying backpacks are rushing toward their warm classrooms. Curious little boys go in to the old schoolhouse - supposedly to get warm.
     
Suddenly things start happening. It is as if someone had waved a magic wand. The door of the small wooden house of culture opens and closes repeatedly. More and more people are coming inside. There is even a shortage of standing room.
      Where did they all come from?
      Only about 500 people live here - virtually all of them Nenets; one Russian fits in as well.
     
Coming to the screening are people of all ages. A colourful array of reindeer clothing give off steam as the snow melts in the heat of the auditorium.
      The silence is broken by waves of rising and waning laughter. Everyone laughs in chorus. Nobody in Finland thought that the movie was funny.
      The viewers are amused by the innumerable details, such as the twists that take place in the Shaman scene, the argument between Neko’s father and the school’s head teacher, and the children’s escape to the tundra.
     
The people are amused by the pompous poetry that Soviet children were expected to learn by rote, and the teaching of mathematics. In a subsistence economy maths had been needed only for counting fish, or for determining the exchange value of a reindeer.
      The audience sighs in rhythm. In the final shot Neko has become Nadja, a Pioneer with a red scarf, whose Leninesque song “Be Prepared” leaves the whole audience silent.
      They wipe their eyes in secret.
      It is hard to talk about the film. The story is too true, too close, and so very painful.
     
The older members of the audience recognise themselves in Neko, their sense of shame to be Nenets, their feeling of inadequacy, and the desire to grow up to be a good Russian.
      “This is straight out of my life”, says a former boarding school resident, who is now more than 60 years old, and who grew up on the edge of the Arctic Ocean as the child of a reindeer-herding family, and was forced into the boarding school, and was deprived of her Nenets name - of her soul.
      She would escape again and again to her home on the tundra, sometimes walking 100 kilometres. Moving the runaway further and further south did not help.
     
Playing the role of the father in the film was 45-year-old Yevgeni Hudi, a reindeer herder himself, who was born on the tundra and still speaks the ancient Tundra Nenets language.
      “Life has changed rapidly outside the hut. In the hut, everything is just like it was a thousand years ago. The relationship between man and reindeer will not change, but if a the reindeer becomes pocket money, everything is lost.”
      Yevgeni Hudi wants his own children to study as far as their strength will allow. The Nenets urgently need more educated people - doctors, teaches, and lawyers.
      The water in the River Ob will not flow for a very long time before the lifestyle that is depicted in the films of Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio will have largely disappeared. Culture turns into folklore, and the people move into reservations of apartment blocks.
     
Development at Russia’s largest production areas of natural gas - the original source of the Nord Stream pipeline, which is to deliver gas to Europe in the future - is frighteningly rapid.
      Things that I saw here just seven years ago have already faded into history. Reindeer can be seen in the villages only on reindeer culture days. The streets are paved, and large numbers of new apartment buildings have risen up in the villages.
      Sell your private reindeer, get an apartment. It is all completely voluntary. The former reindeer herders are moving into villages and towns at an accelerating pace.
     
However, progress is not progressing very well. They are unemployed, there are no more reindeer. But there is no shortage of alcohol, and soon, the apartment is also gone. Already in the morning it is possible to see sad intoxicated people, men and women, on the streets.
      Who would bring Alcoholics Anonymous and rehabilitation clinics here?
     
Gazprom, the huge company that can decide on the use of land in the area, is mentioned only in a whisper. The reindeer herders prefer to move on, out of the way of the gas fields, the pipelines, and the new railways and highways that cut across the Yamal Peninsula.
      Some day they will reach the edge of the ice of the Arctic Ocean, which is where the mammoths, which once wandered to these areas, died away.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 11.4.2010
     
The writer took part in a tour of Nenets villages in the Jamal Peninsula where screenings of the film were held.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Final countdown for reindeer on Russian tundra (15.1.2008)

See also:
  Finnish-made film on Russification of indigenous Nenets people takes main prize at Créteil Film Festival (13.4.2010)

Links:
  Pudana: Last of the Line, official site
  Sukunsa viimeinen ("Pudana: Last of The Line") (IMDb)

KIRSIKKA MORING / Helsingin Sanomat
kirsikka.moring@hs.fi